By Bhakti Raghava Swami
The incident will always be fresh in my mind. I had been a practicing devotee for ten years, eight of which were in the sacred holy land of Sri Dham Mayapur in India. Little did I know that Krishna would be sending me the test of my life, the test of chanting His holy names. As had been the routine since 1979 when devotees from Mayapur had inaugurated the Nama Hatta preaching by introducing the chanting of the holy name in every town and village, as ordered by Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu, I had just returned from such a village preaching engagement in the month of March, 1984. I had joined the Hare Krishna Movement exactly 10 years earlier, January 1974, in the capital city of Ottawa. After serving in Ottawa for two years, Krishna had arranged that I travel to India to attend the yearly Gaura Purnima Festival that takes place in the month of February/March. While serving in Ottawa as the head-cook for close to two years, the chance to visit the birthplace of Lord Caitanya, that very personality who had inaugurated the chanting of the holy names in this same Sri Dham Mayapur some 500 years earlier, had come upon three young brahmacaris serving at the Ottawa temple. By some divine arrangement, I was able to continue serving in India since that first visit in March of 1976.
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